Half the World’s Population Lives in Just 1% of the Land [Map]

Half the world’s population lives in the yellow. The other half lives in the black.

This map was created using gridded population data compiled by NASA. Whereas populations are typically broken down by geographic regions such as countries or states, gridded population data divides the world population into a grid of tiny square-shaped cells, without regard for administrative borders.

The population grid used here comprises 28 million cells, each one measuring roughly 3 miles x 3 miles.

The yellow region in the map includes every cell with a population of 8,000 or more people. Since each of them has an area of about 9 square miles, the population density of each yellow cell is at least 900 people per square mile, roughly the same population density as the state of Massachusetts.

Conversely, the black region is made up of those cells with populations of less than 8,000 people. In other terms, the population density throughout the black area is less than 900 people per square mile.

In total, the world’s population is evenly split between the two areas, half living in the yellow and half living in the black.

Judging by this map, the answer is a clear yes. While overpopulation may be a localized problem in some of the densely population areas of Asia (see population maps of Bangladesh/India and Tokyo), the vast majority of the world’s land area is actually very sparsely populated.

In terms of area, the black region covers 99% of the Earth’s land. Particularly in Africa, where nearly all of the population growth is expected to occur, there is an abundance of open space for more people to live.

Nearly all of the world’s population growth by 2100 will occur in Africa. By that time, the populations of Asia, Europe, and the Americas will be flat or shrinking.

A higher resolution view

Not all of the details are visible in the map at the top. If you’d like to take a closer look, you can download a high resolution version from here.

Below are the zoomed-in views of a few select areas.

India, Bangladesh, and China

The bulk of the yellow region is clearly located in India, Bangladesh, and China.

Nearly half (46%) of the world’s population lives within just the area shown in this image.

And unlike the rest of the world, much of the population is concentrated deeply inland. The Chengdu / Chengking region, the large yellow blob in the center of China, is about the same size as the state of New York. There is a good chance you’ve never even heard of these cities, yet the area is home to over 100 million people.

Java (Indonesia) and Japan

The island of Java in Indonesia, shown on the left, is also about the same size as New York State. It has a population of 140 million, making it the most populous island in the world.

Number 2 on the list of most populous islands is Japan. It contains not only the largest metro area in the world, Tokyo with 37 million inhabitants, but also the world’s seventh largest, Osaka, which has a population of 20 million.

Europe

Though it does not have nearly the population density of Asia, Europe is exceptional for its lack of open space. Unlike the heavily concentrated population centers of Asia, Europe’s dense areas are spread out remarkably evenly across the continent.

North Africa

Though it may not be surprising, the north of Africa is largely devoid of dense population zones, with one major exception.

As explained above, this map was constructed based on a world population grid made up millions of tiny cells, each one measuring about 3 miles x 3 miles. In all the world, the cell with the largest population is located in Cairo. The area, which measures only 9 square miles, is home to over a million people.

United States

This image shows the United States with the state borders overlaid. Coincidentally, the same yellow-black regions that split the world population evenly in half also happen to split the U.S. population evenly in half as well.

As with the world population, roughly half the United States population lives in the yellow, and half lives in the black.

Attribution:

The population data used in the map comes from NASA / SEDAC. It is based on 2000 populations, the latest data available for this level of resolution.

I'm an NYC-based entrepreneur (my newest project: Blueshift) and adjunct instructor at UPenn. I'm fascinated by data visualization and the ways that data is transforming our understanding of the world. I spend a lot of time with my face buried in Excel, and when I find something interesting I write about it here and also as a Guardian Cities and Huffington Post contributor.More about my background

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Love the map! Thanks for posting. Strange that so much of India’s population is concentrated along the Northeast border.

geo

Nothing strange about it – it’s the river Ganges. Their main source of Freshwater.

Barliman

Much is very dry and very hot.

Charles Berger

No question there is enough land to accommodate more people… but that’s not the real question. Much of the “dark” area on the map is either not suitable for dense settlement, or is already dedicated to servicing the needs of the light areas for food (especially protein), water, fiber, and minerals.

Water in particular is a far more important constraint on human populations than land. Sure you can put a billion people in the middle of Australia or Chad… but what will they eat and drink?

John Brunner, in his book “Stand on Zanzibar” from 1968 if memory serves, explored the issues of overpopulation. The title comes from his observation that a world population of 7 billion could all fit on the island of Zanzibar, if everybody stood upright and shoulder-to-shoulder. Many of Brunner’s predictions have come to pass, even in some very precise details like the design of iPods and smartphones.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Not the comments I was expecting from the guy who made those cool maps I saw on Facebook. To clarify, I’m not arguing against overpopulation based on the Earth being big enough for everyone to fit on its surface. I’m pointing out that a small amount of fertile land can support a lot of people, as evidenced by the population concentrations found in Asia. And if that’s any guide, Africa’s population is nowhere near what its land is capable of supporting.

Charles Berger

There I go forgetting my manners again… Let me start over.

Max, bloody awesome map mate! Great fun looking through the detail. I notice NASA has a bit of a time series available, I wonder what an animation of this data over the 2 decades available would look like?

You’ve inspired me to return to my half-finished map of global economic disparity, using World Bank data… might take a few weeks.

Cheers!

Charles Berger

Now, my point on population is that available water, not land, is the key determinant. South & East Asia have a unique combination of Monsoonal rains, plus the Himalaya mountains, which act as a huge reservoir – storing up water in the winter snows, and releasing it gradually over the rest of the year. The predictability, year-round availability, and sheer volume of water is unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

The only parts of Africa that have anything like that kind of water are the lower reaches of the Nile and Niger Rivers, and the Lakes region around Uganda/Kenya. All three of those areas are very densely populated. Across the rest of Africa, water is too variable or just not available in sufficient quantity to support more density. Hence the reliance on grazing or less water-intensive cropping, with correspondingly lower population densities where rice cultivation is possible.

I think you’re right that Africa could sustain more people – particularly with smarter water infrastructure, better governance, etc. – but nothing like East Asian population densities except in a few areas.

Hey, that gives me an idea for a map – something that shows volume of water flow for major catchments overlaid on population density…

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

That’s much better! 🙂

Good point about the Himalayas, explains why the Ganges is able to support so many people along such a long stretch. You’ve convinced me that it probably is a special case, and not representative of Africa’s carrying capacity. Though I also agree that Africa is still likely able to support a much larger population than it has now.

Would also make the point that water is only important for the cultivation of food. In the past, that was critical because food was scarce. Nowadays it’s cheap and likely to get cheaper. If the worst case scenario is having to import some food rather than grow it locally, that’s not good, but doesn’t have to be a humanitarian crisis either.

Good thought on water + population map. Would be interested to see that as well. NASA also has good data on pasture and grazing land that might also make an interesting overlay.

t_lhrh

Sub-Saharan Africa has a greater carrying capacity than what was stated by Charles Berger. The areas around Lake Victoria, the lower Niger River region and the Nile River valley are all places with very large concentrations of people. However, there are huge river basins in Africa that are not that populated. There is the Limpopo and Zambezi River valleys in the southern portion, which are lightly populated. These river systems are just as large as any of the major southern Indian river systems, and presently support only a tiny fraction of the populations found along southern Indian rivers. Then there are the rich soils of the volcanic Rift Valley that ring Lakes Tanganyika and Malawi. Lots of water there suitable for intensive cultivation, but very few people. Then there’s the eastern portion of the Congo River basin, which has fertile soils due to the volcanism that defines this part of Africa. There are steady rains there as well, but again low population densities. The western half of the Congo Basin is defined by the leached and fragile soils of typical rainforests, so population densities will probably not get large there.

Populations in all the regions I mentioned are growing robustly, so they may become heavily populated soon enough. And, in the greater scheme of things, there should be fewer people in the world and not more, so I am in no way happy that these sparsely populated regions of Africa are becoming heavily settled. But there is room to expand in the 11 million square miles of Africa.

Rae

And the wildlife, already under pressure, what of that?

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Yes, you are right. Overpopulation is normally discussed from the perspective of human health / quality of life, and that’s what I had in mind with my comments. But I agree with you, and did not mean to minimize the problem.

It is sad the number of species we have already caused to go extinct, and unless we figure out a solution, I expect the problem will only accelerate as the human population grows and takes over more natural habitat.

Nexusfast123

Our current diet is the elephant in the room being meat based. Forget being sustainable as we would have to eliminate all the forests and hoover the Ocean to extinction to feed to animals and that would still not be enough to support current population levels as income levels rise. Animals produce untreated waste that runs off into rivers and the oceans to create dead zones. History is replete with civilisations that have grown and collapsed. Ours is no different and will collapse big time. No doubt given it is system that assumes infinite growth inside a finite system – the Earth.

Barliman

When it goes, and the biosphere unravels, then we go too– just as we were praising our ability to pack more people in.

The funny thing is that if you go back to 1000 AD or 1 BC, you will find that the 50/50 split in world population distribution is more or less the same. The Ganges Plain in northern India was still highly populated back then, along with the North China Plain. The Sichuan Basin (the center blob in the middle of China with the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing) was also highly populated 1000 to 2000 years ago–many archeological sites in Sichuan demonstrate that it has been an intensively cultivated region for a very long time. Java was also highly populated, along with Honshu, the main island of Japan. The Nile Valley has long been a region with very high population concentrations, just like in this map.

The only differences I could think of would be in Europe–Italy, Greece and Spain would be more crowded while the remainder of the continent was empty. Sub-Saharan African population centers would not be nearly as big, while all the major population concentrations in the Americas would be in central Mexico, the Yucatan, Peru and Bolivia. None would be in the modern U.S., Canada or Brazil.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

That is interesting. In another post I looked at the relative populations of each continent back to 1000 BC, and they have remained remarkably constant as well. As discussed here in an earlier comment, it would be interesting to compare population with water resources and see if the proportions are the same.

Water resources makes a lot of sense to me. The Ganges plain in India is more heavily populated than other regions of the Indian subcontinent because the Ganges River and its tributaries provide a constant source of water in comparison to southern India, where the river basins are less extensive and are more variable due to the monsoons. In other words, during the dry season farmers struggle in the south while farmers in the north can get water through large irrigation systems to survive tough growing conditions.

In China, the same holds true–the Yellow River in the north and the Yangtze River in the south bracket the North China Plain. The North China Plain is very flat, so it’s easy to build huge irrigation systems that link the Yellow River with the Yangtze River. This is where the Grand Canal, humanity’s greatest engineering feat before the Industrial Revolution, was built. Further south in China the land gets too mountainous for vast expanses of flat irrigated land, so the population concentrations drop accordingly.

A curious case is Mesopotamia. Sometime between 3000 BC and 1000 AD it was just as populated as the Nile River valley. But then salt intrusion and destruction of the huge irrigation systems by the Mongols in the invasion of Baghdad in 1258 led to it not being as water-rich as it had been during the past millennia. This led to the collapse of Baghdad as a great world city, and the inexorable decline of Mesopotamia as a population center comparable to Egypt. And all because water was no longer easily available for intensive agriculture.

Stewart Hughes

africa is the next continent to boom,,, its population..

Rae

So what happens to the other species that share this planet with us if we believe there is room for plenty more of us. Where is the water to come from, where will the waste go, we are fouling the place with what we have.
This is crazy, crazy stuff, this IS a finite planet and the reality is, there is only really enough resource on it for about 3 billion of us.
I do NOT want a world with no wild places, no wild things!

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Just saw your comment. Thought I had responded previously.

Agree with you. In the sense you describe, we are already overpopulated and have been for a long time.

Andrm

Fantastic work. Thank you!

A bit of a tangent, but I’d be willing to bet voting data overlays pretty well with your map of the US.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Yes, I bet you’re right. Might be a fun map to compare pop. density and voting record. Probably the same relationship worldwide.

Rafael Lucas Ferreira Alves

AND America?

t_lhrh

I don’t know where the creator of this incredible population map got his/her information, but notice that the Ganges Plain, the North China Plain and the Sichuan Basin were already very heavily populated (in relative terms) between the period 1 CE to 1700 CE. It’s a GREAT historical map! Thought of your post when I stumbled upon it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khFjdmp9sZk

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

How funny. I was just looking at this map an hour or so ago, and then saw your comment.

Yes, really great map! The Ganges is heavily populated from the start. The only part that seems questionable is the Americas. I thought the pre-Columbus population was around 50 million, though I’m sure there is a wide range of estimates.

t_lhrh

There is a wide range of estimates. In this map, the peak population for the Pre-Columbian Americas was 25 million people or so. It’s not 50 million, but at least they got the concentrations correct–25 million or 50 million, most of those people were going to be in Mesoamerica and the Andes prior to the European conquest.

Stewart Hughes

interesting, if u live in a big city u feel like is very over populated,, but most areas are sparse….

Braveman

that number of population live Earth or World?. You can also write that how million square km this yellow area are?

UrbanKorea

Korean Peninsula seems very yellow except for Northern part of Korea.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Yes, I noticed that too. Seems Korea has many big cities that for some reason are not well known internationally.

http://khanneasunztu.wordpress.com/ KhanneaSuntzu

Oh funny I am in some of the yellow scum.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Why scum? Dense cities are the greenest places you can live — very efficient, less driving, shared resources.

blackmedia

Max, This is an extraordinary work you have done here. Congratulations ! Unfortunately this 1% is doing a great destructible job for the rest of 99%. We can see this clearly. A good update for these statistics would be the level of oxygen that this 1% is consuming or wasting, and what is the level of oxygen we need to produce to recover the loss and sustain our lives based on types of plants. And then recalculate as surface. In the end, what is the surface we need to plant so we can recover the loss and sustain our life in the future with the same number of persons.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Thanks! Was thinking of working on something like that — adding resources to the picture. Hard part is understanding which one to look at? Grazing land, water, CO2? Complex topic as you start to dig down.

Crystal Waters

in truth, the available resources-arable land capable of providing sustainable food production, water, mineral resources, etc. can reasonably support 3-4 billion people which, because we have much more population than that already, is why we have so much starvation/malnutrition world wide. it doesn’t matter how much land you have if it doesn’t rain!! more population growth in africa is not a great thing unless it rains there more. look at the maps, once you get away from the coasts, the continent is very dry. so, from my point of view, they should be trying hard to keep population growth under control and not growing substantially unless the rest of the world is willing to ship them water or maybe hire native american rain dancers!

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Agree that looking just at amount of land greatly oversimplifies the issue. Though I would challenge the idea that Africa’s water + land resources are so much less than Asia’s. The data I’ve seen shows the amount of freshwater to be about the same. There is also more to starvation than natural resources. 100 years ago, the world’s population was a quarter of what it is today, and starvation was common. Today, starvation is rare anywhere in the world, and malnutrition is increasingly less common. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of technology and economic / political development (and of course Native American rain dancers as a fallback 🙂 ).

Barliman

There are a couple of issues: an extreme monsoonal pattern (relevant to much of Africa but not China) will strip out many soil nutrients. Old soils are often very nutrient and humus deplete. Australian desert soils never really return much on the investment of water. There are many areas in the Middle East, Africa and Australia that would take an enormous amount of rehabilitation.

A thought does occur to me– from a recent trip to China it was clear that the Chinese are great gardeners– they do things like establish new parks by transplanting in immature trees in the 4-6 metre tall range- and get away with it. If that area has been densely populated for that long, and it is still as fertile as it clearly is, then it stands to reason that the Chinese land/soil management practices are superlative,

Dr. Julian Simon wrote a book “The Resourceful Earth” in the 1980’s that was written to refute the lies of the Carter Administration in its “Global 2000”. When earth’s resources are properly utilized the world’s population can exceed ten to even twenty times the present (6.0 billion in 1980) (7.3 billion in 2017). Most world government politicians are controlled by bribes from banker gangsters through fractional reserve banking, that causes unrepayable debt. The world today needs a world wide debt cancelling JUBILEE. Poverty can be resolved by this method when stolen money is redistributed to the poor. Even this effort will be argued over unto violence. Lack of faith in Jesus Christ will lead many down the path to ignorance and damnation. It is possible with the right person these planet can feed the poor and eliminate poverty as long as that leader is Jesus Christ.

Do you know anything about the limitations of the dataset? I see that there are no yellow cells at all in several countries (Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Botswana), nor in Turkey (apart from Istanbul) or most of Iraq and Syria. It’s difficult to believe that cities such as Ankara, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Riyadh, N’djamena, Basra, Mosul and Aleppo (at least pre-war) don’t cross the density threshold.

Barliman

Let’s shove a billion into our desert in Australia. We are struggling to maintain our agricultural output as it is, and most estimates say that even 20 million is too many for us to feed.

China is quite remarkable, but in the long term I am sure that it wil be proven that high density multi storey living is not compatible with good human health.

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